How to build career expertise for green jobs

Shifting to a circular economy model of production and consumption that eliminates waste, lowers carbon emissions, and ensures a level of environmental resilience is a key part of achieving global goals around climate change, but such a transition needs to be driven by people who have the skills and knowledge to take it forward, according to environment sector experts. The transition itself will also generate new jobs — 24 million according to the International Labour Organization — that individuals will need to be equipped for. “If we don’t have the people to do the things that have to be done, to change our mindset, to move the paradigm from linear to circular, we’ll have the big theories there, but nothing will happen … so capacity will have to be built,” Letitia Abra-Kom Nyaaba, director of the Ghana National Cleaner Production Center, said at an event organized by EU Green Week. For her, any skill that promotes sustainability, reduces pollution, creates wealth, protects populations, conserves resources, and decreases materials could help in the transition. Some of these skills could be encompassed in roles dedicated to protecting the environment, such as environmental scientists, solar panel technicians, or farm managers. But ultimately any job can be green, said Eric Roeder, an ILO technical specialist on green jobs, climate action, and resilience through just transition for the Asia Pacific region, if it works to make processes more environmentally friendly while offering certain social protections. The ILO defines a green job as one which contributes to preserving or restoring the environment, “be they in traditional sectors such as manufacturing and construction, or in new, emerging green sectors such as renewable energy and energy efficiency.” But what are the skills needed to apply a green lens to development work? Here is an outline of the competencies experts believe development workers in particular should look to have in order to meet the demands of the emerging green job market. A level of climate literacy Whether you’re working in education, migration, or global health, having an awareness of the impact of such projects on climate change as well as on development is important because the two agendas overlap, said Rachel Huxley, director of knowledge and learning at C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. That means understanding the various components of climate mitigation and adaptation and how they can be incorporated into development work. “For example, sustainable agriculture, that's an area where we need to change our food supply … If you're working in that field, it's really important to be climate literate so that whatever solutions we come up with are resilient to climate change,” she said. And if you’re working on a project that's going to generate employment, how do you make sure that it's accessible to the local population and that the right skills and training are provided? These are some of the questions Huxley flagged and that development workers should be asking as they work on various projects that may intersect with climate and employment. “Then you can demonstrate that as an individual, you bring that holistic view and you're not asking someone to choose between development or climate or employment,” she said. “There's a huge development agenda. There's a huge climate agenda. There's a huge need for employment. If we don't bring those things together, then we'll be pitting one against the other and we don't have resources to do that.” Resources that could help in building climate literacy include the C40 knowledge hub, which supplies guides on implementing climate solutions in a city context, the Climate & Development Knowledge Network’s global south-focused resources, and the summaries of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings. Specific expertise A mix of general skills and technical skills are needed, Giorgio Mosangini, team leader of green entrepreneurship and civil society at SwitchMed — a gathering of Mediterranean stakeholders who work to build synergies, exchange knowledge, and scale up social and eco-innovations — said at the online event. “We need knowledge and skills related with eco-innovation, life-cycle thinking, and eco-design. Skills linked to eco-innovation would allow us to develop those innovative business models we need, offering new and alternative services able to reduce environmental impacts,” he said, citing a shift to electric vehicles as an example of this in practice. “From an eco-design perspective and life-cycle thinking, we need skills and competencies to reduce life-cycle impacts,” Mosangini said. These might include knowledge about recycling materials, water reuse, energy efficiency, and pollution elimination. SwitchMed offers training and mentoring to entrepreneurs and startups so that they know how to embed circular innovation into business models, plans, products, and services. “At the end of life phase, we need skills and knowledge to extend resource use … and recover resources after disposal,” he said. The World Economic Forum describes green skills as “knowledge a worker can use to prevent, monitor, or clean up pollution, and optimize stewardship and conservation of the natural resources that companies use to produce goods and services.” On a practical level, this might include expertise in sustainable investment, eco-engineering, urban farming, or environmental policy and justice. According to the Global Green Skills Report 2023, only 1 in 8 workers has one or more green skills yet they’re increasingly valued by employers over university degrees. Creative and critical thinking For Roeder, a person’s thinking process and creativity is of more importance when thinking about the green economy than having studied for a specific certificate or technical skill. “It requires lateral thinking, thinking a little bit outside the box, always trying to improve something,” he said, explaining that old systems need to be looked at and innovative approaches applied. “Your skill level needs to be developed in such a way that you’re moving away from a linear way of thinking such as our linear economy to a circular way of thinking.” That said, Roeder believes educational institutions should be focusing on making students think in terms of circularity, while Adriana Zacarias Farah, head of Global Opportunities for the Sustainable Development Goals, or GO4SDGs, at the United Nations Environment Programme, believes the environment should be a crosscutting theme across all educational courses from finance to history. Students should be encouraged to do innovative thinking and question the current systems, she said. “We need to have more critical thinking and that will help us in creating new models in business, in society,” she said. Ultimately, more companies both in and outside of the development sector are beginning to factor the environment into their operations, consider their emissions, and create more employment with a green lens to honor commitments to the Paris Agreement. That means the change is happening and the employment landscape will change, Huxley said. “So it's a choice about how you upskill yourself, not if you upskill yourself.”